The friendly virus

But Martha has been excited about phages for a long time.

So why are things moving so fast so suddenly? Why is this happening now? Well, to try and answer that question, I got up very early this morning, and I'm currently on the train to Paris.

[instrumental music plays] Why Paris? It's a key location for the start of the curious history of these friendly viruses.

But first, I want you to hear a story set not in France, but in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Crucial to the development of phage technology is a 100-year-old scientific institute in Tbilisi.

The Eliava Institute was named after its founder, microbiologist George Eliava.

In its heyday, it wasn't just a lab.

It was a factory producing and supplying phage medicines for soldiers in the Soviet army.

These were life-saving phage mixtures or cocktails that worked against diseases like cholera and gas gangrene.

When the Iron Curtain fell across Europe at the end of World War II, the phage research being done in Tbilisi was cut off from the accelerating research into antibiotics in the West

Whatever was meant to be good for Western people was, of course, criticized in the Eastern part of the world, and vice versa.

So-

So phages were counted as Soviet-

Yes

... science-

Uh, yes, of course, yeah

... and not to be trusted.

Yes, yes, exactly.

[instrumental music plays]

That's Nina Chanishvili, head of the Microbial Biotechnology Laboratory at Eliava.

I met her in Tbilisi back in 2019, and I saw more than Eliava's research labs.

I also saw the clinic where phages were being used.

So coming in, and there's a waiting room.

[door squeaks] And there's half a dozen people in here from all over the world who've come to meet the doctors.

People like Anya, who had come from Switzerland with a persistent stomach ache that was making her life miserable.